Video Game / The Ninja Kids

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The Ninja Kids is a side-scrolling arcadeBeat 'em Up made in 1990 by Taito. It received no ports until its inclusion in the Taito LegendsCompilation Re-release in 2005. The story is about an evil sect trying to summon "The Satan" on July 1999 (as foretold by Nostradamus), and only a group of four ninja can stop them.

Pretty standard fare for a videogame, except for the fact that almost every character is a puppet. No, not People Puppets, just regular (?) puppets. Everything about this game is very tongue-in-cheek, though, so it also can be seen as a Stealth Parody of typical cheesy brawler storylines and settings.

The game provides examples of:

Acrofatic: The fat mafiosi attack by, among other things, cartwheeling over you.

Bloodless Carnage: Enemies are constantly sliced and diced, heads and limbs are falling, but since everyone is a puppet there's not a single drop of blood.

Conservation of Ninjutsu: Level four is a great example of this trope. In this level, called "A bad ninja appears!", the heroes take a break in fighting the satanists and instead fight the ninjas from a rival dojo or something. Throughout all the level you fight dozens of ninjas that take a few hits to die, then you get to the boss, which is almost identical to them but is (obviously, being the boss) a lot harder to defeat.

Dem Bones: Right before the final boss, the ninjas find themselves in a crypt full of bones underneath an abandoned church. Suddenly some skeletons spring to life and attack them.

Follow the Leader: This game is pretty much Taito's answer to Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat'em up that came up one year earlier and was a smashing success. Let's see: up to four players multiplayer, four colour-coded ninjas that fight with different weapons (although in TNK they're mostly blades), the ability to throw scenery elements against the enemies, plus one of the levels (a burning apartment complex) is remarkably similar to the first level in the TMNT game.

Magic Pants: The employee-turned-werewolf at the end of level one has them; also a Magic Shirt, in that he rips apart his clothes when transforming, but still has them when defeated and turned back to human.

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